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2014-04-30

I cannot digest "model driven engineering". Sorry.

Lately, I am being told that "Model driven engineering" is the future in Automotive (and also various other Industrial automation fields). That, it is the standard (apparently) to which most of the industry has already moved. Basically means, "goodbye y'all embedded programmers".

While I clearly see the potential theoretical benefits, I cannot oversee the fundamental flaws in the approach. Every single tool vendor out there, who provides an end-to-end solution, ensures that you are locked in firmly and deeply. This lock-in starts from software and goes all the way to the hardware. Simply put: You cannot model with one tool, generate code with another, and use commodity hardware to verify/test the model with the actual hardware. Heck, you cannot even version control any of this with a tool of your choice. You'll have to go back to folders named "version-1", "version-2", etc.

None of these tools come cheap BTW (~50 Lakh INR to get the whole chain to work, apparently). That creates a huge entry barrier in terms of sheer capital investment. That automatically puts the target industries out of reach for most start-ups. The main driving force (as I understand) seems to be "testability". The industry does have many fancy terms to call the different facets of this (verifiability, traceability, ..), however. Its all the same old story anyways.

While the rest of the software industry has dealt with this quite well (we even got JavaScript testable, duh!), these particular domains are looming in darkness (or so it seems). Maybe I am wrong. Maybe my sources of information are wrong. But this does bring me to an important decision point. If this is how it has to be.. then I have choices to make. The knowledge that I can walk away (like its not my fight to fight), does feel gratifying. But I am not going to ignore that the problem does exist.

The need of the hour, IMHO, is a community that can break this market up so that there is fair participation and true innovation from all ends. I am talking ~10 man-years of development work. Sorry, its not my fight. My bread and butter is a work-in-progress (literally).